When did it begin?
Frey asked himself, watching the visions from a long-forgotten time.
Wandering through the shadowy vastness of the cosmos, lost in the world revealed by the mask, Frey finally began to glimpse fragments of the truth.
Earth… was just one planet among hundreds of thousands scattered across an unfathomable universe.
Far beyond it was a larger world, orbiting quietly in the cosmic void.
A planet called Krat.
A world that had birthed a civilization so advanced, it stood unrivaled in all known history.
And it was all thanks to the noble race that inhabited it.
Highly intelligent, almost human in form .. save for their ghostly pale skin and dull gray irises.
But their true distinction lay in something far deeper:
They felt nothing.
Love. Grief. Anger. All foreign to them—emotions stripped away at birth.
What remained were muted senses—pain, cold, heat—no more than the bare instincts shared by all living things.
This trait, both gift and curse, rendered them machine-like in behavior. Free from sentiment, they pursued progress with unrelenting focus, reaching levels of scientific and philosophical development that others could only dream of.
And more than that… they were immortal.
They didn't age. Didn't decay. Upon reaching maturity, their bodies simply stopped changing. The only way to kill one… was to literally destroy them.
Semi-eternal and utterly logical, they held no need for names. Each individual bore a number—identities reduced to strings of digits, like items in a vast inventory.
Their society was flawless… or so it seemed.
Among them was one—designated 4005—whose name echoed more than the rest.
Why?
Because one day, he stood before the elders and declared:
"We will be invaded. Our planet will be erased."
A war was coming, he said. One that would end with their annihilation.
But when asked for proof, he gave none.
He spoke of visions, of knowledge beyond comprehension. But to a race ruled by reason and evidence, it was heresy.
They cast him out. Branded him a madman.
Years passed… and nothing happened.
His people advanced, expanded, flourished—while he, obsessed and alone, dedicated himself to a single field of study:
Time and space.
Decades of obsession led him to break the boundaries of physical reality. He discovered a way to bend space itself, allowing him to teleport across unimaginable distances in a blink.
An awe-inspiring feat in any world.
But to his people?
A pointless pursuit.
And then, just as he had foretold… the demons came.
Krat became their next conquest.
The invasion was a nightmare.
Krat resisted with the full force of its technological might—but no defense could hold.
Because something else had arrived.
Agaroth.
The newly crowned Demon King.
The being who forged the Upper Seats.
The one who shattered the Duchy of Hell and crushed every demon lord who opposed him.
A monster so vast, so terrifying, they called him the Devourer of All.
He descended like a black sun… and with him, the war ended in catastrophe.
It was nothing short of a genocide—an extinction witnessed by the world, where an entire race was wiped out, from the first to the last.
The demons showed no mercy, terrified of the terrifying potential that race possessed.
A race that couldn't die. A race devoid of emotion. Left unchecked, they would evolve endlessly.
What if a species like that, one that had poured all its focus into development, turned that focus toward war? Toward power?
A chilling thought ... one that ended in a massacre, a slaughter of billions.
They all died, marking the complete end of a civilization.
All except one.
The only one who was different. The one who had spent his entire life studying a field deemed utterly worthless.
The one who, through sheer obsession and brilliance, had mastered time and space—developing the power to teleport instantly across vast distances.
And so, the moment the invasion began, he vanished.
Effortlessly, he warped away to a distant planet, watching from afar as his homeworld burned, and his people were erased from existence.
The reason he had dedicated his life to space-time, and nothing else, was for this moment. To survive. When the demons came.
He had known. He'd seen the future—and used that knowledge to save himself.
Alone.
The only one who was different… survived.
His world was destroyed before his eyes. Everyone was killed.
But for someone who had never known true emotion, he felt nothing.
No sorrow. No fury.
The thought of revenge never crossed his mind. It never even occurred to him.
He turned his back on his world without a second thought and began a new journey .. one driven solely by his insatiable thirst for knowledge.
He had so many questions about the vast universe he barely understood.
And about himself.
Why had he been born different?
Why could he see the future?
Why was he special?
Countless questions plagued his mind—questions he was determined to answer.
And so, he traveled the stars alone, immortal, searching for knowledge. For someone like him, who felt nothing… that was enough.
Wherever he went, he became fixated on a new aspect of life.
A forbidden one.
One that no mortal dared to understand.
Life and death.
When corpses fell before him in battle, he often found himself staring at them, wondering ..
"Why do people die?"
At the same time, he witnessed the miracle of birth, of new life entering the world.
And that raised a second question:
"Why do people live?"
Life and death—two forces beyond mortal grasp. Yet he was drawn to them. Fascinated by them.
And for reasons he couldn't explain, he felt that understanding them was the key to understanding himself.
If he could control life and death… perhaps he'd find his truth.
Years passed, and that fascination became obsession.
An obsession that drove him to madness.
He clashed with many who stood in his way. And when they resisted, he killed them.
Many fell by his hand .. and through that, he came to understand how easy death truly was.
"I can control death."
But the opposite? Bringing life?
That was beyond him.
He had taken many souls—but given nothing in return.
Years went by, faster and faster, as he dove deeper into his obsession.
And eventually… he did the impossible.
He achieved something no one else could have imagined.
He learned to store souls.
So long as they hadn't fully passed on, he could capture them—preserve them.
What once seemed like madness… became reality.
Using his power, he began trying to give life in his own way .. by storing the souls of those who died in war and battle, protecting them from fading away.
At first, he crafted crude vessels—primitive bodies forged from black metal, their expressions frozen at the moment of death.
Some smiled in peace. Others wore faces of sorrow… or rage.
They looked like statues. Monuments to lives lost.
And yet, for the first time… they lived again.
That was how the statues Frey had encountered several times came to be—Smiley, Sad, and Angry.
They were his first experiments.
From beginning to end, he viewed them as nothing more than trials to satisfy the ever-growing obsession within him.
But his efforts succeeded. Eventually, those vessels moved on their own, retaining all their memories.
And he didn't stop. He kept moving forward.